Nov 4, 2010

BEIJING – A leading Chinese air conditioning and refrigeration components manufacturer has purchased SolidWorks® software to shorten its product design cycles and improve product quality.

Zhejiang Sanhua Co., Ltd. holds a share of over 50 percent in the market for air conditioning and refrigeration unit control valves globally. It is the supplier of some world’s leading manufacturers, including Sanyo, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, and Emerson. Sanhua is using 115 seats of SolidWorks CAD software, 12 seats of SolidWorks Simulation software, and 35 seats of SolidWorks Enterprise Product Data Management solutions to overhaul its design processes. Sanhua’s deployment of SolidWorks solutions marks a big leap towards its transformation from a supplier into a R&D-oriented organization that provides high-value design schemes. SolidWorks solutions are conducive to accelerating change management throughout the design and production processes and allow Sanhua engineers to predict the performance of the finished products even during scheme designing.

“We usually have a tight timeframe for designing schemes and a relatively flexible organizational system and designer team. This requires a sound guarantee for symmetrical and timely information transmission so that we can accommodate changes quickly to minimize the risk of customer drain,” said Qiu Yongwei, Zhejiang Sanhua’s department director. “SolidWorks CAD software makes change management faster because every change our designers make on a model can automatically become part of the drawings associated with the model. Our previous 2D CAD software couldn’t support this kind of fast change process.”

SolidWorks solutions will enable Sanhua to work concurrently on designing, testing, prototyping, and production planning, which will shorten time to market. When a customer requests a change, Sanhua engineers modify the SolidWorks model, which automatically propagates the change to all of the drawings made from the model. Prior to deployment of SolidWorks solutions, every change had to go through a time-consuming six-step process that required creating new drawings manually. Sanhua also plans to use SolidWorks Simulation to test product performance before production to improve quality and reduce prototyping costs.

Sanhua works with SolidWorks authorized reseller Hangzhou Huarui for training and technical support.